


into the arms of my dead

by silkensong



Category: Mother 3
Genre: Angst, Blood, Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, No Incest, POV Alternating, but for how long, the usual warnings for m3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:09:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24294886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkensong/pseuds/silkensong
Summary: Lucas is ten and he knows this.
Relationships: Boney & Lucas, Claus & Hinawa, Claus & Lucas (Mother 3), Hinawa & Lucas (Mother 3)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30





	into the arms of my dead

**Author's Note:**

> tw: flint is an awful parent  
> lots of talk of death  
> mentions of blood

Lucas is ten and he knows this:

The forest is burning around him. He can taste the spill of ash on the back of his tongue, so unfamiliar to him in the way that he’s tasted it, in every covered inch of grey sky around him. Lucas can hear the forest screaming, each tree howling in pain as it is stripped down, from flourishing to empty husk.

Maybe Lucas is screaming too. Mom is gone ─ he doesn’t know why or where she is, the cold is seeping through his clothes, the river water has filled his lungs, he can’t where is she where’s Mom?

There’s a cut on his leg from a rock. Blood drips lazily into the river, dissipating into thin trails of red behind him. Once Lucas had read about sharks, tracking their prey through the water by the tiniest drop of blood; now he wonders, can the monsters who killed this forest track him, too? 

One of the villagers pulls him out. The cold is sinking deeper into him, jaws snapping at his ribs, his lungs, pulling the breath from his body. Lucas shivers and he shivers and he shivers. Somebody wraps a towel around his shaking form, rubbing circles over the tops of his arms. He leans in closer to Claus, who is still here, who is still living, who is warm and solid against him.

Lucas shivers and shivers and wants to scream so, so badly. But he doesn’t. Because Claus is still here, still breathing, and Lucas has to be strong because Claus is silent next to him. “Where’s Mom?” His brother asks, the quiet settling within his heart. “I want Mom. Where is she?”

The silence is deafening in the air around them. Someone has settled next to Dad, whispering solemnly into his ears. Something tangible, solid and real around Lucas, thickens the air. The cut on his leg isn’t bleeding as heavily anymore.

But Dad is howling, grieving, snapping and snarling like a wounded beast. He breaks free from the hold of the villagers around him, roaring in pain. It scares him. Lucas draws his legs closer to his chest, as if that will hide him from the monsters in the forest. As if that will protect him from the beast snapping at the other villagers.

“Please don’t,” says Lucas, even as he realises that his words will do nothing.

Dad snaps and snarls, teeth bared; in his hands he clutches a log, but Lucas’ vision is so blurred that he can’t tell what it is. He isn’t crying. Dad raises it up, curls his arm to the side, and, and ─ he falls. Lucas does not cry.

Boney curls in a protective circle around his legs, head laid out over Claus’ feet. He makes a sad, mournful whine in the back of his throat; Claus scratches behind his ears, Lucas runs his fingers through the tangles in his fur. “Good boy,” one of them murmurs into the soft fur. He can’t tell which it is.

Lucas does not cry. He stays near Boney until his heart stops shaking, until the tremors leave his fingers, until he is finally lurching into sleep. His dreams are filled with neon colours that spill into each other and blood, an unending, flowing river of blood that drips down, down, down. Lucas dips his fingers into it at an invisible voice’s urging. His brother’s hands drag him down into it.

When Lucas wakes, his brother is gone and his mother is gone and his father is in jail. Nothing is as it was, nothing will ever be the same again. Lucas does not cry.

There is a field of sunflowers that stretches out as far as the eye can see. He opens his eyes to find himself lying flat in the grass. When he turns over, the sky has been replaced by a blanket of yellow petals. With one hand he grabs one. Snap the stem, pluck the petals away one by one by one.

“He loves me, he loves me not,” says his mother’s voice, distant and far away. “He loves me. Pluck the petal, Lucas.” He does. It falls to the floor, brown crumbling inwards like rot. “He loves me not.” It’s a repeated phrase, by this point, losing meaning with every repetition of it. “Remember that I will always be with you; you don’t have to be so lonely, Lucas.”

He drops the petal down to the floor. The wind is picking up, tearing away Mom’s words. “Mom,” Lucas tries to say. It sticks in his throat, a bloated lump. “When are you coming home?”

“I’m not, Lucas,” she sighs, pressing an imprint of a kiss to his cheek. “You and your brother won’t be joining me for a long time, if I have anything to say about it.” He holds out his hands. She takes them.

“Mom.” Lucas says again. “Mom, I ─”

(She takes your hand. You’re crying, maybe, because you’ve always been a crybaby at heart and you haven’t cried in years. “You don’t have to come home yet,” she says; the tears come in further falls, down and down and down. She takes your hand.

She takes your hand. She isn’t letting you go, you know by now. “Mom.” You say, but she is gone.)

“Please don’t leave,” Lucas wants to say, and he reaches out for a ghost’s hand. The sunflowers vanish: their petals have been caught by the wind, torn from their fixings and thrown loosely upwards. The wind will carry them home. Instead, he tells her, “I’ll be home soon.”

His mother’s voice is a familiar melody. It’s one that must have been carried through time and space itself, one that sings within his blood and calls out,  _ you are home. Be free.  _ Lucas sings it to an empty graveyard, in the hopes that it will carry her spirit to someplace happier than this.

(The people of Tazmily have changed, and that’s okay. It may be a lot colder now, and the people there may think that Lucas is a crybaby who nobody wants to be around, but that’s okay, too. Because Lucas has Boney when he has nobody else. Because Lucas is good, the trees whisper in the depths of their roots, just like the forest-burners are bad.

It’s okay, says Lucas, even when everyone else around him says it’s not.)

Lucas tastes fire in the back of his throat. He knows the forest’s destruction and reconstruction like he knows his own heart, a solid pulse drumming at his throat. Lucas tastes fire and ash where the forest has shed its leaves. Where the birds have hidden for shelter, their songs still and quiet in their throats. The pulse a steady heartbeat in the chest.

Lucas knows the forest and the forest knows him. It tastes the swollen breadth of his feeling, too much too bright too warm at once, a star bursting and crackling before its eyes. It sings its song of faith and unchanging time, and Lucas listens.

Lucas is ten and he knows this:

The forest is regrowing from its roots. Green has begun to shine amidst the ash; the rain has washed away every trace of destruction, has turned the soft ground over so that new beginnings can arise from it. The sunflowers on the porch are still growing.

Dad is in jail. Mom is dead, killed by ─ something, Lucas doesn’t know what. He wasn’t listening, lost in the haze of grief. In some desperate pursuit for revenge, Claus has chased after it; nobody has seen him since. They’ve all begun to assume he’s dead. (Except Dad. Dad can’t lose faith in Claus, after everything.)

And Lucas? He’s scared. But the sunflowers are still growing. Lucas can rebuild himself from the ashes of this tragedy. He can turn the soil over, he can replant the seeds.

He can begin anew, even after this.

**Author's Note:**

> [lucas, banging pots and pans together] ALL MY FAMILY IS DEAD
> 
> i just wanted to smush all of my feelings about lucas into this so ! here you go! please take care of yourselves <3 also i hate that i had to specify that there's no incest (some of yall r nasty)
> 
> comments are my lifeblood!


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